HP Proliant MicroServer

[memilanuk]

Saw a link to this on another forum and thought it was pretty neat. Hopefully its of interest to some other people here...

HP Proliant MicroServer

Looks like its ready to stuff full of drives, install a Linux distro on it and start serving files to a small LAN...

Thoughts?

 

[SimonD]

It's a decent box, the one thing to be aware of is that it requires LFF (Low Form Factor) hdd's, at the moment I don't know how big they will go up to but I have 320's that are LFF.

A thing to be aware of is that the cpu is fairly limiting (although for a NAS device not so much (it's an AMD 1.3 dual core laptop cpu) and it takes RDIMMS (2 slots only, a max of 8gb I believe).

I have one that I am going to be building up (it has USB internally as well as an eSATA port (internal connection with a lead to the outside of the case) that I am also going to see if I can boot from (OCZ Throttle 8GB).

More feedback in a couple of days.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It's a decent box, the one thing to be aware of is that it requires LFF (Low Form Factor) hdd's, at the moment I don't know how big they will go up to but I have 320's that are LFF.

LFF is "Large Form Factor"...meaning the older 3.5" models.
versus
SFF, "Small Form Factor", which is the newer 2.5" drives (like we've seen in laptops for years).
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c01424195.pdf

You can get them in TB sizes if you want, capacity is not a worry....they're usually not too far behind the consumer SATA market.

 

[memilanuk]

One of the things that I'm curious about is... it looks like the optical disk drive (ODD) cable is a simple SATA cable... which makes me wonder if it would be possible to mount the stock 160GB SATA HDD up in the 5.25" bay for the optional optical drive (assuming one could find a suitable drive bay adapter) and then use all four removable HDD bays for a RAID 5 array...?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Specs state it only supports RAID 0 'n RAID 1...onboard SATA controller so its FRAID (fakeraid.. a nickname given to more software driven RAID controllers).
I'd bet it would see the SATA drive fine that you plugged into the CD SATA controller. Benefit though? It has an eSATA controller if you want to expand your external storage more.

 

[memilanuk]

I'm operating under the assumption that it doesn't really have hardware RAID, but fakeRAID. Since it supports RedHat Linux, I would most likely be putting CentOS 5.5 on there and using software RAID (mdadm) which means I shouldn't be limited to the fakeRAID options. If I can fill the removable drive trays with 2TB drives and get 6TB of storage instead of 'just' 4TB in a RAID 5 config by moving the 160GB system drive to the ODD bay instead of having to deal with eSATA and another enclosure... seems worth trying to me.

I called and spoke with a support 'engineer' today; he said that what I wanted to do should work, but would not be officially supported. Since I'm not planning on putting one of their officially supported OSes (don't think they consider CentOS to be 'close enough') in there, I'd be more or less 'on my own' anyways...

 

[kamina]

We have hundreds of HP servers and have run CentOS and RHEL (3, 4, 5, 6) mixed together for years. They work just as well, and to be honest I don't know what you'd want the manufacturer support for, they won't be touching your operating system anyway (to install their software you did previously have to change the /etc/redhat-release to state it was a real redhat but then it would work fine).